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Monday, March 5, 2012

Even young kids figure out what you like from what you choose

We figure out a lot about the people around us from what
they do rather than what they say.The
actions people take say a lot about what they truly want, while the statements
people make may not reflect what they truly believe.That is why we prefer people who ‘walk the
walk’ over those who ‘talk the talk,’ and we push people to ‘put their money
where their mouth is.’

What allows us to figure out what people really like from
their actions?When do we learn to do
that?

This question was taken up in a paper by Tamar Kushnir, Fei
Xu, and Henry Wellman in an August, 2010 paper in Psychological Science.

They start with a simple example.You can figure out whether people’s actions
tell you what they like when there is a clear choice in the world and people do
something systematic in that case.Imagine you go to a candy store and all they have is chocolate.You bring your friend to the store and tell
her to buy something.She buys
chocolate. It is hard to say from this
choice that she really likes chocolate.All there was in the whole store was chocolate.Maybe she prefers Gummi Worms, but they
weren’t available.

But, what if you take your friend to a store that has
chocolate on every aisle, but then there is also one display case with Gummi
Worms.Now, if she buys Gummi Worms, you
can safely assume she really likes them.After all, if she just grabbed something in the store by chance, she
probably would have gotten chocolate.The fact that she picked something rare in the store means that she must
really like it.

Perhaps this isn’t so surprising, but Kushnir, Xu, and
Wellman looked at whether 3- and 4-year-olds could reason in the same way.They had children in the study look at a box of
toys.Some boxes only had one kind of
toy in them (like soft baseballs).Another box had two toys in it (like soft baseballs and soft
basketballs).A third box also had two
types of toys, but there were mostly toys of one type and a few of the other (a
lot of soft basketballs and just a few soft baseballs).

Now, the children watched as a puppet took five toys out of
the box.In each case, the puppet took
five of one type of toy out of the box (say, soft baseballs).Then, the puppet went away.The child was shown three toys, the two from
the boxes and a third that they had never seen before (like a green golf
ball).The puppet came back, and the
child was asked to give the puppet the toy it liked best.

The children were quite smart about this.When the box only had toys of one type, then
the children gave the puppet each of the three toys about equally often.That is, they seemed to realize that the
puppet had no choice but to pick one type of toy, and so that didn’t tell them
much about what the puppet really liked.

When the box had two types of toys and there were many more
of one type than the other and the puppet consistently picked the rare toy,
then the children almost always gave the puppet the toy it had picked.

When the box had the same amount of each kind of toy, then
the children also gave the puppet the toy it had picked, but they did so a bit
less consistently than when the toy was really rare.

This result (as well as the results of a follow-up study with
20-month-old infants in the same paper), suggest that humans are very good at
figuring out what other people want just from what they do.

It is important that we have this ability from fairly early
in life.The psychologist Mike Tomasello
has argued that humans are very good at passing along culture, because children
are able to figure out why people are doing what they do from watching what
people are doing.As a result, children
learn quickly how to perform actions that will allow them to achieve desirable
goals.

In addition, in order to figure out how to succeed in our
social groups, we have to be able to predict what people will do in the
future.By using people’s actions as a
guide to their thoughts and preferences, young children help to fit themselves
into their network of caregivers and friends.